"The scandal is the fact that police failed to act," rabbi tells ‘Post.’

The rabbi, who asked that his name not be given, told The Jerusalem
Post on Monday that he made three attempts to urge the police to intervene but
that at least a dozen officers remained passive and indifferent to the
anti-Jewish tirades.

Speaking to the Post from Vienna, the rabbi said
that last Thursday, after a soccer match between Greece and Austria, a group of
10 to 12 youths congregated in downtown Vienna on Schweden Square and one of the
extremists yelled “shitty Jew” and “Jews get out.” The hooligan then raised his
hand and made the Hitler salute.

“I usually ignore that,” the rabbi said,
“but with so many police around, I looked at two police officers and asked, ‘How
is this allowed to happen, because it is not just an insult but a criminal
offense.’” Austria’s hate-crime law bars expressions of classical anti-Semitism
and giving the Nazi salute.

According to the rabbi, the police officer
told him “come on, it is soccer today.” He said he then approached a second
group of police officers, who told him they did not see anything. When he
explained to the second contingent of officers that “at least 20 witnesses saw
it,” the police responded that they could not help him, he said.

The
rabbi sought the help of a third group of police officers, where an officer told
him that he “should not get too excited.”

The rabbi said the overall
reaction from the roughly 200 to 300 police officers present was “annoyance”
with him.

“The scandal is the police not acting on it,” said the rabbi.
He said he filed a complaint and “the higher ranks of the police are taking it
seriously. The higher ranks do not condone this type of behavior.”

The
rabbi noted that a police officer in front of the Jewish community center told
him that the police “use a de-esclation strategy” at soccer matches because of
the masses of spectators involved. The rabbi said he does not subscribe to the
view that it was necessary to defuse the crowd, because the soccer match was
over.

“I have my doubts, no mass of hooligans” was present at that time,
said the rabbi. He stressed that a dozen police officers ignored his call for
help.

The Vienna-based Jewish news website Die Jüdische, whose
editor-in-chief, Samuel Laster, has contributed news dispatches to The Jerusalem
Post, first reported in German on the story last Thursday.

Oskar Deutsch,
the head of Vienna’s 7,500-member Jewish community, condemned the verbal abuse
and the authorities for ignoring this outbreak of anti-Semitism.

“I see a
great danger in the passivity of some officials of the executive branch toward
aggressive anti-Semitism,” said Deutsch, who added that to “leave a rabbi
without protection to the verbal insults of soccer fans... cannot be explained
away by de-escalation and requires immediate corrective action. Anti-Semitism
must not be allowed to be tolerated as a part of soccer culture.”

The
Simon Wiesenthal Center on Monday slammed the neo-Nazi abuse of the Vienna rabbi
in a letter to Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner.

“Police
refusal to intervene is too reminiscent of the 1938 Kristallnacht Reichspogrom
in Austria,” wrote Dr. Shimon Samuels, director of the center’s international
affairs department. “Law enforcement that betrays the victim is accomplice to
the perpetrator.”

He also noted that “for many years, the presence of the
late Simon Wiesenthal in Vienna acted as a restraint against overt expressions
of anti-Semitism,” adding that “this year, however, witnessed Jewish cemetery
desecration and a Nazi-style cartoon by an Austrian political leader on
Facebook.”

The letter stated that “now, a rabbi was this weekend
assaulted in Vienna by, reportedly, neo-Nazi soccer fans in front of police
officers. Indeed, our protest at fan racism in Buenos Aires led to the AFA
(Argentine Football Federation) disqualification of points won by the Chacarita
Juniors Football Club.”

Samuels continued that “This red flag penalty
against hate is to be presented to FIFA and a European Parliament directive is
to be adopted by the Parlatino [Latin American Parliament]. It should also be an
example for Austrian football.”

The center shared the letter with the OFB
(Austrian Football Association), “urging that – in cooperation with the Ministry
– disciplinary measures be taken, including penalties to be applied to the team
supported by the delinquent fans and the prosecution of the bystander
policemen.”